John Kenn Mortensen – Sticky Monsters – Artist Profile

John Kenn Mortensen was born in 1978. He is a Danish artist who lives and works in Copenhagen. Mortensen is a master with pen and paper and his imagination is second to none. During the day, he employs these skills as an animator and director of children’s television programmes. But when darkness falls, he lets his imagination run wild, and from the nib of his pen flows a host of monsters, ghosts and ghouls, terrifying enough to give those who are faint of heart cause to double check that their doors are locked at night.

“I write and direct television shows for kids. I have a set of twins and not much time for anything. But when I have time, I draw monsterdrawings on post-it notes… it is a little window into a different world, made on office supplies. People will always be afraid of monsters. For some people, spiders are monsters… just very small monsters.It warms my heart when I am able to scare people or just give them the sense of having experienced a small adventure from something so simple as a drawing on a post-it note.There is this very fine moment right before you realize you are gonna be eaten by something you never thought existed. It is like when you get bad news and you think…I never thought this was gonna happen to me.” – John Kenn Mortensen